Can Ashton Eaton Save the Decathlon?

Ashton Eaton is vying to become the first person to win back-to-back decathlons since Great Britain’s Daley Thompson did so at the boycotted 1980 and 1984 Games.

Photograph by Andy Lyons / Getty

Ten years ago, Tate Metcalf, a high-school track coach in Bend, Oregon, was trying to find a college that would give one of his athletes a scholarship. Ashton Eaton was a talented sprinter with a fierce long jump, but Metcalf received mostly lukewarm responses. His coach felt that Eaton would have the best shot at getting into a Division I college if he competed in one of track and field’s multi-event disciplines, like the heptathlon or the decathlon. Metcalf knew it would make Eaton, who was raised by a single mother and had never had any private coaching, one of the first people in his family to go to college. So he suggested it. “Sure,” Eaton replied, as Metcalf recently recalled. Then Eaton said, “What’s the decathlon?”

Eaton ended up attending the University of Oregon, where he set a variety of collegiate records, although his college coaches concede that without Metcalf’s phone call, Eaton easily could have been overlooked by recruiters.

Eaton, who is twenty-eight, is now the defending Olympic gold medallist and world-record holder in the event. “He’s the face of track and field,” Metcalf said, sitting underneath a giant banner of Eaton draped over Hayward Field, in Eugene, Oregon, at the Olympic trials earlier this summer. “But nobody knows it because he’s a decathlete.” It’s true: though he has a gleaming smile, press-perfect interview skills, and historic talent, Eaton has remained virtually unknown relative to his Olympic-champion counterparts and even some of his decathlete predecessors. The one place he’s remained indisputably famous is Eugene: here, his face graces billboards and bus signs; the local minor-league baseball team recently distributed Ashton Eaton bobblehead dolls as part of a tribute night to him. “I haven’t seen them yet,” Eaton told me. “It’s a little weird.”

The decathlon hasn’t always been a path to athletic obscurity. Many consider the winner of the event, which can trace its origins to ancient Greece, the “world’s greatest athlete.” The sport vaulted Jim Thorpe to stratospheric fame and put Bruce Jenner on Wheaties boxes. (In the lead-up to the 1992 Summer Games, in Barcelona, Reebok built a major ad campaign around Dan O’Brien and Dave Johnson—“Dan & Dave”—but it fizzled when O’Brien failed to qualify for the Olympics.) Eaton’s dominance puts him in their class, or above it: he set his first world record in 2012, and if he wins a gold medal in Rio he would become the first person to win back-to-back decathlons since Great Britain’s Daley Thompson did so at the boycotted 1980 and 1984 Games.

Those post-Jenner years were especially lean ones for the decathlon in the U.S. “We stunk in the nineteen-eighties,” Eaton’s coach, Harry Marra, said. “Nobody in the U.S. was on the podium.” Marra, who coached Eaton at Oregon, concedes that keeping fan interest alive across ten events and two days is challenging for even the savviest of broadcasters. The “dec,” as it’s often called by its practitioners, consists of hurdles, long jump, discus, shot put, javelin, high jump, and pole vault, plus runs of a hundred metres, four hundred metres, and fifteen hundred metres. Each contest has a point value; the athlete with the highest score at the end wins. It’s not tailor-made for TV highlights.

But Marra hopes that Eaton’s performance and star power can drive more interest in the sport—particularly if Eaton and his wife, Brianne Theisen-Eaton, each medal. (Ultimately, Theisen-Eaton won bronze in her event, on Sunday.) Theisen-Eaton represents Canada in the heptathlon. She and her husband met in college; Marra is her coach, too. “I think it makes the pursuit quite a bit easier because she understands what it takes,” Eaton said, of Theisen-Eaton. “In our marriage, the success of our athletic dreams comes before everything. ‘Hey do you want to watch a movie?’ ‘No, I have a hard workout tomorrow.’ ”

At Hayward Field during the trials, Eaton was cheered on by another family member: his mother, Roz. During the pole vault, she held her breath as he hoisted himself into the air, and only exhaled when he thudded to the pad below, the bar above still resting on its brackets. Now a real-estate agent in Bend, Roz Eaton worked a variety of jobs to support herself and her son, who spent much of his childhood climbing, running, and darting around anything he could, often while wearing a Superman cape, she said. She relied heavily on friends and family to shuttle him to various sporting events. “My decathlon was raising Ashton,” she said. “I told his coaches, ‘I’m a single mom and my kid is watching you,’ ” she added. “ ‘And I expect you to be the best you can be. He’s watching you because I gave him permission to watch you.’ And they took care of him.”

Unlike many young athletes, Eaton was competition-averse. When her son was in middle school, Roz Eaton said, she was summoned to the school and told that her son was throwing races and had a poor attitude. If it continued, he would not be permitted to compete at a district track meet. “He didn’t want to keep winning because nobody else had an opportunity to win when he competed,” she said. “It took us a while to figure it out.”

“He loves the limelight when it means seeing his name on record boards,” Metcalf said. “But he doesn’t like to beat other people. As a high-school boys’ coach, you can kind of get in the grill a bit and pump them up, say ‘Let’s get this guy.’ But Ashton never worked that way.” Metcalf told him to think of the decathlon as a competition against the self—a common enough approach, but one that continues to come in handy for Eaton, who, at this point, is often competing against his own records.

When the decathlon’s final event, the fifteen hundred metres, began at Hayward Field, Eaton was already far enough ahead of his competitors to be sure of his place on a second Olympic team. His mom sipped a beer and watched a highlight reel of her son playing on a nearby Jumbotron, her eyes watering as she shared a hug with Metcalf. When Ashton crossed the finish line, he hugged his teammates, as usual, and then they dived together into the steeplechase pool. Later, at a press conference, he vowed to rest between now and the Olympics, and dodged questions about his post-Rio plans. “The Olympic Games is every four years,” Eaton said. “I feel like if I use that one per cent to focus on something else, what if I lost by ten points? That’s the one per cent.”

Eaton has said in passing that when the Olympics are over he wants to go to Mars, a comment that seems slightly less strange after you listen to him geek out about NASA and Elon Musk—the man has a passion for outer space. (Neighbors in Oregon gossip about spotting Eaton flying his drone around his home.) His mother, in any case, takes the Mars idea seriously. “Someone’s gotta go,” she said. “Why not him?”

Mary Pilon is the author of “The Monopolists,” a book about the board game Monopoly. She previously worked as a staff reporter at the Times and the Wall Street Journal, where she wrote about sports and business.